[148] Amy Perrin. His wife, daughter of a rich burgess, François Favre d'Echallens, and reprimanded incessantly by the Consistory, was the implacable enemy of the ministers and of Calvin.
[149] Jacques Gruet, formerly a Canon, and a man of licentious and irregular morals, impatient of all restraint either of Church or State. Severely censured by the ministers on account of his debaucheries, he had uttered threats of death against them, which he even ventured to affix to the pulpit of St. Peter's Church. His trial, conducted with all the rigour of that period, terminated by a sentence of capital punishment. Condemned for sedition, blasphemy, and atheism, he perished on the scaffold the 26th July 1547.
[150] Subjected to torture, Gruet admitted his guilt, and as well on the ground of his impious and blasphemous productions, as of a letter written to a private individual, in which he exhorted the Duke of Savoy to turn his arms against Geneva, he was condemned to death. It appeared, according to the letter of Calvin to Viret, of which a fragment is here reproduced, that this sentence was not unanimous, and that Gruet reckoned up to this time, in the councils of the republic, friends or accomplices who were desirous of saving him. This did not prevent his execution on the 26th July 1547, and the example threw terror into the ranks of the party of the Libertins. On the trial of Gruet, see the various historians of Geneva,—Spon, Picot, and the Histoire de la Suisse, vol. xi. pp. 364, 365.
[151] Entitled: To our very dear lords and brethren who desire the advancement of the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ.
During the period that the Reformation was for a while overcome in Germany, and that it had to sustain the rudest conflicts in order to its establishment at Geneva, the most alarming reports were spread among the French Protestants, and carried discouragement and dismay into their ranks. Calvin, addressing his brethren from the midst of the struggle in which he was engaged against the party of the Libertins, reassured and comforted them by his letters, and exhorted them to place their entire confidence in God.
[152] Ils font des mauvais chevaulx à mordre et à regimber.
[153] Francis Baudouin of Arras, a distinguished lawyer, fled to Geneva on account of religion. He became the friend and the secretary of Calvin, whose opinions at a later period he attacked, and betrayed his confidence by robbing him of his most precious papers.—(See Drelincourt, Defence of Calvin, pp. 251, 252.) Called successively as Professor of Law to Bourges, to Strasbourg, and to Heidelberg, Baudouin died in 1573, leaving the reputation of one of the most learned men of his time, and of a most versatile spirit in matters of religion. It has been justly said of him, that he was a Roman Catholic in France, a Lutheran at Strasbourg, and a Calvinist at Geneva.
[154] See note 1, p. 111. Dryander seems at this period to have filled the office of secretary to M. de Falais. He carried on at the same time a correspondence with Calvin, expressing the highest esteem for his character and talents.—Library of Geneva, Vol. 110. One of his brothers, John Ensinas, had been burnt at Rome in 1545, a martyr to the Protestant faith.
[155] Some Flemish and French refugees had already formed a community at Vezel, which was enlarged in 1553 by the dispersion of the foreign congregation of London, and which was constituted as a church by the minister Francis Pérucel, called La Rivière.
[156] Jacques Gruet. See p. 128.